Mandello del Lario

Mandello del Lario, plain Mandello until 1863, is one of the few Lombard municipalities made of two detached pieces of land: almost all the town lies on the eastern shore of the Lecco branch of Lake Como, a smaller strip on the opposite one, with nothing but water in between. Behind the houses the ground climbs to the Grigna Settentrionale, the mountains Leonardo da Vinci noted in the Codex Atlanticus along with a cavity going two hundred steps underground, where, he writes, there is ice and wind in every season. The name most likely comes from the Latin Amandus, and a funerary stele bearing that very name turned up at Abbadia Lariana, once Mandello land.

Above the town, at Maggiana, stands the tower house locals call the Barbarossa tower. In 1828 a mason dismantling the first-floor fireplace found a granite slab blackened with soot: cleaned up, it said that Frederick, emperor of Germany, had rested there safely in the year 1158. Moto Guzzi, founded in Genoa in 1921, has had its plant here from the start; the eagle on the badge remembers Giovanni Ravelli, racer and airman, the fourth partner who never was, killed in a test flight before the firm existed.